(Untitled) Frome
Jim Isermann

Jim Isermann’s work for Intervention/ Decoration was a decoration and a provocation, as radical as it was simple. Isermann has exploited the language of design throughout his career and his project in Frome was no different.

Isermann believes in art’s ability to make the world better through improving the quality of its objects and surfaces and in Frome this took a very particular form. Using 1960’s textile designs produced in the town as his source material, Isermann twisted the original designs into a strident tessellated pattern in a confrontational combination of blue, yellow and black. The pattern was produced as a print run of posters that were pasted onto all of the boarded-up windows and building site hoardings in the town centre.

Isermann’s superimposition of his pattern on the boards that blind empty buildings and the barriers around their re-invention was a direct response to the past loss of a skilled industry and the hole that leaves in a community’s identity. It was a joyful but jarring warning to remember that it is within our ability, and is our own responsibility, to make our present a better place.